Thursday, August 22, 2013

Creating a SQlite database via 10.2 ArcPy

At ArcGIS 10.2, there is not support for SQLite database, according to Wikipedia is described as follows:

is a relational database management system contained in a small (~350 KB) C programming library. In contrast to other database management systems, SQLite is not a separate process that is accessed from the client application, but an integral part of it.

It's not too hard. All file paths must end in '.sqlite' extension. The database supports two spatial types: "ST_GEOMETRY" or "SPATIALITE". ST_GEOMETRY is Esri's storage type, whereas SPATIALITE is the SpatiaLite geometry type. ST_GEOMETRY is the default geometry storage type.

This database can be fully used with the python sqlite3 module that comes as a default with any python installation. This means you can create a database using ArcPy, then perform all updates through native SQL instead of update/insert cursors.

Some notes:

":memory:" stored databases are not supported, they must be written to disk